Marvelous Marty Stratton over at id Software has updated the news on QUAKE Live with juice on new servers and tweaks to the systems. Chew slowly gang, there's a lot here!

We've changed the way that we handle the reporting of people who switch teams and quit games. Couple aspects of this:

--We've removed the term DNF (Did Not Finish), and now refer to these as "Quits." If a player does not finish the match on a team, it is considered a Quit. If they do finish on a team (even if they've switched teams) they either get a win or loss depending on which team they finish on.

--Vital Stats - There are now two lines summarizing each player's position upon finishing. The first line shows their "Wins" and the second line shows their "Losses / Quits."

--Match Details - In the match details view, players who have switched teams or quit a match are summarized in the "Switched/Quit" row that can be expanded to view those individual players. If a player switched teams and finished the match on the opposite team, they will appear in the final roster of the team on which they finished, but also appear on their original team with a "switched" icon. Players who quit the match, will be grayed out and have the word "Quit" appear next to their name.

The goal with the above is to allow you to see as much information about players that purposefully quit matches to avoid a loss, while also making a loss and quit effectively the same thing. It should also help highlight players who switch teams (often to balance teams) and not punish them for doing so (i.e. by limiting the view of their stats).

Duel Detective - the number of other players using the Duel Detective will now show as part of that functionality.

Fixed an issue where improper parameters were being used when launching a Clan Arena practice/bot match.

There's more info on QUAKE Live today with the latest interview at GameInformer. The new interview touches on a variety of subjects in regard to this free, browser-based version of Quake II Arena. Answering questions from the id team are CEO Todd Hollenshead and biz dude, Steve Nix.

GI:Oh yeah—I’m just wondering, did you use Quake Live as an opportunity to maybe look at those things that maybe kept it from being perfect, and make some subtle gameplay tweaks?

Hollenshead: Yeah, absolutely. We—for one thing, we did some things to balance it out a little better. Basically every map in Quake Live, even if they’re identical to Quake III—identical from the standpoint that I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, and I’m pretty good at noticing those things—they’ve all been touched up in some way. Like dark areas are brightened up to make it more appealable to people so they don’t have to over-bright their monitor, or for people who are just getting into the game so they don’t see sort of dark corners that they can’t see things in. So we tried to kind of make everything a little more visible. So that was number one. Number two is of course we had to put stuff in for ads and stuff like that, but that wasn’t really a big task because we already had all these banners and things like that, that basically were—I mean when Quake II was released the game was kind of designed as a sporting arena. So really all we had to do was kind of turn where we had videos of Quake III to ads. And we incorporated a few other things in but, a lot of that stuff I think are difficult to notice and they don’t seem out of place, they feel like they’re in congruity with the rest of what the game is about. You know if you’re watching a baseball game, if you’re focusing on the pitcher and the hitter you don’t realize that there’s ads rolling behind the backstop. Or in hockey on the boards, that you’ve got ads on all of them. So that stuff was probably the second thing. The third thing is that we did subtle tweaks to some of the weapons, like splash damage on rockets, we reduced the railgun from a hundred points of damage to eighty, so that reduced the advantage of highly skilled players and sort of made players that—you don’t get spawned in and then boom, you get a rail and you’re dead. Because the railgun used to do a hundred points of damage, it was an instant hit weapon, so people who were really accurate, really good, one shot and you’re dead. Now at least it takes two. So I think things like that—though with the railgun it doesn’t feel underpowered, it’s still a very powerful weapon, but it’s better balanced between power and some of the other weapons in the game, because really good guys would—it was rail-rocket, you know things like that. So we did make a few tweaks to it, but just to try to kind of balance things a little better.(More)

There's some seriously kool QUAKE Live love over at ESReality in the form of an Unofficial QUAKE Live Trailer by killat0n! Available in a few sizes and formats, this awesome looking trailer/ad is packed with juicy frags and effects that combine to create a very sweet visual ride. Should it be the official trailer? You'll have to decide for yourself, so head on over and give this one a good look!

There's some great news for players on the QUAKE Live site as Marty "The Magnum" Stratton of id has posted they have added some new servers, and are working on setting up even more outside the U.S.A. I haven't had any troubles playing from up here in Canuckia, but I am looking forward to seeing a server up here in the next week or so. Here's a little list of the new ones added in the States as well as the new global servers that are on the way. Hit'em hard and hit'em fast gang!

Hey, wanna see something kool? Check out the new 3D screenshot of QUAKE Live over at Panogames! They’ve added a sweet QUAKE Live gallery to their site that show off eight screenshots that you can move around to see 360 degrees and really get a feel for the action that’s frozen in time. Don’t miss these ones folks, you’ve just got to love interactive eye-candy!

Many players will be glad to hear the queue is gone for now and the site and game are online and kicking after some downtime to make some changes and fixes yesterday. They are in the process of brining back full stats as well since that was something that got trimmed during the heavy opening of the public beta. Hit the QUAKE Live site for the full update, and here's a taste of what's what.

We took the site down for about an hour today to implement changes that allow us to now re-enable most statistics reporting. The one element of stats that we are not re-enabling immediately is the specific data tied to each individual frag (i.e. what weapon was used, what items you were carrying, who you fragged, etc.). We do however intend to re-enable these frag specific stats very soon after evaluating back-end performance. The only side effects of this specific set of stats being disabled is that you won't see weapon specific frag counts in your statistics page or in the individual game details views, and we've temporarily hidden about 25 of our more than 80 awards - these 25 relate specifically to individual frag statistics. If you had earned an award (prior to us disabling stats) that is now hidden, when we start reporting those stats again, your award will re-appear and you won't need to re-earn it.

With the open beta status of QUAKE Live, there’s been a real rush on id interviews, so I’ve gathered them up for you in one convenient spot. Click away to your heart’s content, and I’d like to thank Voodoo Extreme for some of the links. Have at you!

If you're looking for more QUAKE Live goodness, just hit the new QUAKE Live Interview at GameSpy for a ton of info and details on the project from id's own John Carmack and Marty Stratton! Sure the company has a few paddles in the water right now, but this one is all about the latest Quake to hit the scene, so dig right in!

GameSpy: I'm thinking the approach is like that of a sports game, where it would be unnatural for the ads to not be there.

John Carmack: Right, and that's why Quake III was the perfect game to try something like this on. Ninety-percent of the videogames just wouldn't be at all amenable to a treatment like this. Can you imagine playing a more serious single player game like BioShock with ads strewn throughout the game? It just wouldn't make any sense. With Quake Arena it makes perfect sense. These big arenas, everything fits in stylishly, it's tactfully done, it just fits in really well.

From the time of this post, we're only about a half an hour away from the "open beta" status of QUAKE Live! That's right gang, in 30 minutes we'll be able to play the latest Quake to hit the scene and here's to hoping for a nice big, clean launch! I know the id team has worked long and hard on this one and I'm really looking forward to the action tonight. CYA soon!

As I've mentioned over the last few days, QUAKE Live will be going live, or at least into "open beta" stage in less than 23 hours from the time of this post! Adjust your life accordingly gang, this is going to be a blast! For info on QUAKE Live if this is the first you're hearing; it's a free, browser plug-in based online shooter that's basically a juiced up Quake 3 Arena. The online page is easy to navigate and you can be playing in just a few clicks on your visits, once you're all setup. The features for friends and the overall community are all there and ready to serve.

The game is free and continuing support will be funded by in-game advertising, which appears in the form of billboards in the game levels. I've been playing this for quite some time now and the ads have never been an issue, and I am confident that the advertising that makes it into the game will be appropriate. What I mean is that I don't think we'd see any Tupperware ads during a CTF match. So get ready to rumble you frag monkeys and hit the PQ QUAKE Live Section for more info and screenshots. The hour draws near!

WhOOp! Slide over to the QUAKE Live site today and you’ll find some very good news. The game is going open beta on Tuesday February 24th and that means everybody gets to play! The game will still be considered “beta”, which means work is still being done on it, but the team is happy enough with their progress to let the world jump on into the party. Here’s the official word from the beta site news, and while you wait to play you can visit the QUAKE Live site for a sweet new wallpaper.

First, we want to thank everyone who has been playing, testing, providing feedback, inviting friends and hopefully enjoying the QUAKE LIVE closed beta. We've grown considerably over the past 6 months and are now excited to announce that we're opening QUAKE LIVE to the general public as an open beta the evening of Tuesday, February 24th. On Monday morning (U.S. central time) we'll be taking beta.quakelive.com down for about 36 hours and then opening to the public at www.quakelive.com on Tuesday evening.

Coordinated with the open beta will be a stats wipe and pruning of player accounts, however we want to make it as easy as possible for all of you to transition over. On Monday, we will be deleting the player accounts of people that have not played in the last 28 days. If you have played within the past 28 days, you will lose your stats, but will NOT lose your player name, custom settings, profile information, etc.. When the site opens again on Feb. 24th, you will be able to use your current email address and password to login as usual. If you have friends that haven't played recently, but will want to maintain their account, let them know that they should play a game between now an Sunday. After Tuesday, we do not expect to ever completely wipe QUAKE LIVE player stats again.

We're going to post some additional information in the Developer Notes about the opening of the game, what it means to leave the 'beta' tag on the site during this time, and discuss some features and functionality that we're planning for the next couple of months that we know you'll be interested in. This is a very exciting time for the project and we hope that all of you, who have contributed your time and feedback, share in that excitement. We hope all of you continue to be active contributors to the game as we work to make it better for months and years to come.

If you’ve been hiding under a rock, or a mountain of snow and are not sure just what the upcoming QUAKE Live will offer, and how, then you’ll get the info you crave in the QUAKE Live Hands-On at Big Download. Covering pretty much everything from setup to throw-downs, the two page piece will enlighten you on what you’ll get for free when this Quake 3 flavoured free shooter is unleashed.

I saw over on Blues that the task of supplying and maintaining the network aspect for the upcoming QUAKE Live free, online shooter will go to GNi. The Gni announcement yesterday doesn’t have any info on the game coming out of beta, but it does list some of the community features we’ll be able to have at our fingertips, like friends lists, communication, player skill matching, sponsored events and tournaments, stats tracking and more!

“GNi has significant experience in the hosting of rapidly-scaling online games which solidified them as an excellent choice to host QUAKE LIVE. The back-end systems and infrastructure are critical elements in reliably delivering QUAKE LIVE’s state-of-the-art web interface, and GNi’s ability to scale quickly using their Dedicated Hosting Infrastructure ensures that we always have the immediate and flexible capacity to provide our constantly expanding player base the best game experience on the web,” stated Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software

In a new interview with John Carmack on CVG, we get more insight into what the man thinks about the PC as a platform and the free game model being tried with QUAKE Live.

If this is successful, do you plan on releasing more browser games?

If it is successful, we've tossed around the idea of taking the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory game (which was actually always more popular than Q3A in the online space) and doing a similar treatment on it with the experience we've gained here. But no effort will be spent on that until we know whether Quake Live was a brilliant idea or if it was a dumb move.

The wait is over for the QuakeCon 2008 QUAKE Live CTF Finals & Awards Video from QuakeUnity! So far the videos have been as sweet as Quad and packed with plenty of action, so this latest addition should be just as tasty. The new video shows off action on Q3CTF3 "The Stronghold" and Q3CTF2 "Troubled Waters" along with film of the award ceremony, so it’s an all-in-one wrap-up. You can download or just stream the video, so there’s no reason to not get to see this one!

The first batch of videos from the Quake Live CTF tournament at QuakeCon 2008 are now up over at QuakeUnity! The first set is the top of the winner's bracket matches with three maps played by teams billymaysdaze (cloud9) and inninitforthe$. The finals are still coming, but this is definately something sweet to chew on in the meantime!

The QuakeCon videos are flowing like a fine wine at Quake Unity now with the recent addition of the QUAKE Live finals between SK-ZeRo4 and cypher and the awards ceremony. Also available is some preliminary action with SK-ZeRo4 working his way into the finals against rawfuh and griffin. All the videos come with commentary and in various sizes for your downloading pleasure, and be sure to watch for the QUAKE Live CTF videos which are said to be coming soon!

There's been a trailer released for QUAKE Live at GameTrailers showing off some of the new models in action on the newly redone QUAKE 3 maps as well as a brief look at the website used to get into the action! The action itself looks just like Quake III Arena and Team Arena, but with a little more power and polish. Check it out the QUAKE Live Trailer at GameTrailers for a brief glimpse of the newest QUAKE!